ImageWorks Branding& Marketing Blog

Google’s +1 Button Challenges Facebook’s Like Across the Web

Posted by Scott June 2, 2011

Google is jumping on the one-click-to-share bandwagon and so is Image Works Studio! Google released its newest gadget in March 2011 in seach and has already been seen in the wild on numerous online news outlets around the web. Taking just moments to add to any website,

this feature can be added to any website to make content available to “go viral”.

Here is a great article from Mashable.com detailing Google’s latest development:

Google is taking its +1 feature beyond search results and launching a button that publishers can include on their own websites.

The button, which debuted in March in Google search, will compete with the likes of the already ubiquitous sharing buttons offered by Facebook and Twitter (and more recently Tumblr and LinkedIn) for web page real estate.

The +1 button will begin appearing Wednesday on a number of select publishers, including Mashable (it should be live here between 1-2 p.m. ET), though the code is now freely available to anyone.

As with most other sharing buttons, setting up the +1 button on your website is straightforward. Google has created a simple tool that lets you choose from a number of sizes and styles, and then provides the appropriate JavaScript code that you can cut and paste into your site.

Google’s hoping that +1’s integration in search results will make it an attractive option to publishers, which stand to gain more traffic when their visitors start “+1ing” content. Google articulates this benefit in a blog post: “The next time your connections are searching, they could see your +1’s directly in their search results.”

For now though, +1 remains an experimental feature that Google search users need to opt in to. You’ll only start to see your friends’ recommendations next to search results once you’ve opted in and are signed into your Google account. Presently, it’s also only available on English-language search results.